Eating Our Way to Civility: A Dinner Party Guide is now available as an e-book. Learn more about the e-book, and contribute to the movement to increase civility by having fun and declicious dinner parties at the Eating Our Way to Civility blog. Check out Dan's UCLA Today interview about the book and blog.

The 15 species of marmots make an ideal experimental system to ask questions
about the evolution of social behavior and communication because they
live in a variety of habitats, exhibit a range of social systems, and
all species emit between one and five types of alarm calls. Past
studies have focused on the meaning of these calls. Current work
focuses on yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky
Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado to better understand the
evolution of alarm calling and social variation, antipredator behavior, as well as how alpine
animals respond to climate change. The behavior and population biology
of the marmots of RMBL have been continuously studied since 1962.
Exciting new research directions focus on understanding reproductive
suppression in females, coalitionary alliances in males, the
consequences of social relationships, and the importance of 'stress' in
reproduction and health. Visit the RMBL Marmot Project website for more information and a comprehensive list of publications.

We are building
tools to inventory animals by detecting, recording, and
analyzing their
sounds. Among other functions, this will enable behavioral
ecologists
to study the temporal and spatial dynamics of acoustic communication,
and conservation biologists and wildlife managers to acoustically
census animals. While there has been the development of
“proof-of-concept” tools and algorithms for many of the components of a
usable system, there is no reliable, robust, and easy-to-use system
that will permit field biologists to easily census acoustic
animals.
With NSF support, we are developing VoxNet: an integrated
software and
hardware package which will be a quantum leap forward beyond existing
technology in four main areas: software, near-real time event
recognition, energy efficiency, and a much longer communication range.

The sound and the smell of fear. What is it that makes sounds scary? Why do certain smells evoke fear in animals? How can knowledge of this be used? In a series of studies with marmots, kangaroos, deer, and people, colleagues and I are studying the biological basis of fear. Recent studies have demonstrated that non-linear sounds (noise, abrupt frequency fluctuations, biphonation, and subharmonics) are uniquely alarming and emotionally evocative to mammals, including, apparently, humans. Specifically, horror film soundtracks have more noise than would be expected, while sad dramatic movie scenes use abrupt frequency fluctuations and biphonation to make us feel scared or sad. Other studies seek to better understand how predator urine can be used as natural repellents, and by doing so, hopefully save many 'problem' animals from elimination.

Recent advances in comparative
methods have led to a renaissance in
the study of the evolution of behavior. Past studies have focused on
the evolution of social and communicative behavior in ground-dwelling
sciurid rodents, and the evolution of infanticide in rodents. Current
work focuses on the evolution of communication and social behavior in
birds and mammals and on factors that influence longevity in birds.

Many birds and mammals vary the amount of time allocated to the
mutually-exclusive activities of foraging and antipredator vigilance as
a function of the number of adjacent conspecifics. This fundamental
tradeoff has important consequences for the evolution of sociality but
could result from two very different pathways: feeding competition, or
a reduction in the risk of predation. Comparative work seeks to understand the evolution of so called
'group-size effects', and empirical studies on marmots identify mechanisms underlying vigilance.

Many species are isolated from the predators with which they evolved.
Remarkably, we know little about how long presumably adaptive
antipredator behavior persists in a species' behavioral repertoire once
selection is relaxed for antipredator behavior. Previous work focused
on kangaroos and wallabies that are either found with predators, or
have been isolated from them for 30 to 9,500 years. The goal was to
understand how long antipredator behaviors of different degrees of
sophistication persist under relaxed selection. An exiciting dimension
of this research created virtual worlds where we studied relaxed
selection for antipredator behavior. New work focuses on marmots and
the degree to which predator discrimination abilities persist for
extinct predators.

Knowledge of animal behavior can help us conserve and manage endangered species. A
common management intervention to recover a locally extinct population
is captive breeding followed by reintroduction. Sadly, most of these
reintroductions fail, and predation is often implicated as the cause of
failure. Previous work focused on detailed studies of predator
recognition abilities in kangaroos and wallabies as well as the
critically-endangered Vancovuer
Island marmot, combined with studies that focus on specifically
what is learnt when animals are trained to recognize predators. Work
sought to understand the degree to which kangaroos and wallabies
benefited from living socially. Even relatively non-social species may
benefit from aggregation.

Ecotourism is the fastest growing part of the world's largest industry, tourism. Yet, in
order for ecotourism to be sustainable, we must know much more about
how non-humans perceive the myriad of impacts associated with tourism
so that they can be minimized. Unfortunately, most studies focus on a
single species and there is no theory managers can use to predict how a
particular species might react to, say, the construction of a hiking
trail. Current and future work aims to develop predictive models about
how species react to human impacts based on an understanding of
life-histories and evolutionary "experiences". In addition, Esteban and
I have written A Primer of Conservation Behavior for Sinauer.

At UCLA we teach an intensive field biology class called the Field Biology Quarter. I've taken groups of highly-motivated undergraduates to Australia, Kenya, the Virgin Islands, and Belize for a bout of intensive research and learning. Students write proposals while in the US, then, working collaboratively in groups of three, have 3 weeks in-country to conduct the research. A bout of analysis and writing follows back in LA. In the past, students have conducted first-rate research and a variety of these student-generated projects (mostly focusing on antipredator behavior and communication) have been published. Some have even received popular press!

Colleagues and I are creating a field of Natural Security. Inspired by some inflexible responses following the attacks of September 11th, and our slow responses to adapt to to asymetrical conflicts with insurgents, we use the lessons of 3.5 billion years of life to try to develop novel defensive strategies. All animals must learn to live with risk; those that don't die or become extinct. Thus, the term 'war on terror' is flawed in that it assumes we can eliminate risk; we can't and therefore must effectively manage it. The diversity antipredator behavior provides a variety of strategies animals use to manage their threats. Outcomes of this interdisciplinary collaboration have included an edited volume, called Natural Security, a symposium at the 2009 AAAS meetings, a Nature Opinion piece, and a ONR-G meeting in Edinburgh in 2010.

To study behavior one must often quantify it. With NIH support, we
developed, and freely distribute, a new and powerful event-recorder and
analysis package. It is written in the Java(TM) computer language so
that works on virtually any modern microcomputer. Sinauer has published the JWatcher
book--Quantifying Behavior the JWatcher Way.

I feel that if we love nature, we're obligated to protect it. Thus, I'm involved in several projects that seek to translate science to action through environmental education and public outreach. Charlie Saylan and I have written a book-length treatment of our PLoS-Biology essay--The failure of environmental education (and how we can fix it) for University of California Press (to be published in 2011). I've started to write Op-Ed pieces, and I write popular pieces whenever possible. A recent example of this is my essay in Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories About Global Warming on pika. I also take children and adults out 'marmoteering' as part of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory's Environmental Education Program to share my excitement of biology and animal behavior with others.

Some material on these pages is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (DEB-1119660) Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.